Building Peace Abroad and at Home

Few students would approach clashing with a parent when learning to drive with peacebuilding techniques. But when Lilly Vickerman ’24 had a fraught, front-seat moment with her father — a moment that will be familiar to anyone who has been in either role in that situation — she applied conflict resolution methods she learned on an NCS Global Programs trip in June.

Vickerman was part of a group of 13 NCS Upper School students who participated in a peacebuilding program with the Rose Castle Foundation. This new experience supplemented the exchange program that NCS has had for 38 summers with St. Paul’s Girls School (SPGS) in London.

As in years past, NCS students stayed with SPGS families and attended school during the morning with their counterparts at SPGS. They also saw the sights of London and Cambridge and attended the musical SIX, written by an SPGS graduate.

Then the group traveled to Carlisle in the Lake District to engage in a workshop called Emerging Peace Builders. With guidance from Rose Castle staff and three interns — one Muslim, one Christian, one Jewish — the NCS contingent learned about the characteristics of reconcilers and engaged in peace- and trust-building exercises.

In one workshop, the students, divided into two groups, were separated by a massive wall of boxes. One group was the lobsters, and the other was the elephants. The lobsters had committed an atrocity against the elephants, and they all had to figure out how to reconcile. Notes were passed back and forth, and when negotiations were successful, a piece of the wall came down.

In another exercise, students and adults listened to a seemingly simple story about a queen’s (ultimately tragic) adventures in her kingdom. The group then ranked the story’s characters from morally best to worst and then reconciled their rankings with each other’s. Melody Fox Ahmed, director of global programs and trip leader, recalls, “Everyone had very different, and strong, opinions. We saw how hard it is to reach consensus, even in a seemingly low-stakes activity.”

While in Carlisle, the entire group, including NCS chaperones Fox Ahmed, Math Department Chair Natasha LaPointe, and Senior Chaplain Eva Cavaleri, spent two nights in a youth hostel and two nights at Rose Castle, the 800-year-old seat of the Bishops of Carlisle. Fox Ahmed says, “In going from the home stay experience to the hostel to the castle, we were able to reflect on how the transitions in our environment impacted our group cohesion and learning.”

For Sofia Hall ’27, Rose Castle was “an environment completely free of judgment and preconceptions.” She appreciated the opportunity for reflection: “While a lot of our reconciliation work centered around resolving conflicts between two external groups, I was able to take a lot of the tactics we practiced and translate them to my own inner strife.”

Fox Ahmed found one unstructured session to be the most memorable. The group gathered in the castle’s parlor to engage in an open conversation about faith and values. Students posed questions, launching freeranging and profound conversations.

The students came away with approaches to apply in their personal lives and at school. For Vickerman, a method of reconciliation called PIN, for Position, Interest, and Need, helped her recognize that she and her father shared the goal of having her learn to be a safe driver.

At the end of the program, students designed a plan for bringing their learning back to NCS. The participants created a new extracurricular club, the Rose Castle Society, to apply their work in the techniques of reconciliation on the Close.

This article first appeared in the Fall/Winter 2023 issue of NCS Magazine and Annual Report.